A former
U.S. ambassador to Finland has begun training to fly aboard a Russian spaceship
as the backup for a Canadian space tourist set to blast off in September.
American
attorney Barbara Barrett is training as a
backup crew member for a Russian Soyuz flight slated to deliver Cirque de
Soleil founder Guy Laliberte to the International
Space Station for a 12-day stay this fall, according to Space Adventures
Ltd., the Vienna, Va.-based firm that organized the training and flight.
"Training
as a backup for the September space launch is an adventure - and education - of
a lifetime," said Barrett, a former deputy administrator of the U.S. Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA), in a statement. "The space frontier inspires
young people today just as it did Galileo and Copernicus centuries ago.
Students today who build science and math skills will have access to the thrill
of space travel almost routinely in their lifetimes."
An aviation attorney who became the
FAA's first female deputy in 1988, Barrett is an instrument-rated pilot and has
served on the boards of a number of aerospace companies, including Raytheon,
the Space Foundation and The Aerospace Corp.
Barrett
also was the first woman to run for governor in Arizona, losing the state's
1994 Republican primary to incumbent Gov. Fife Symington. More recently, she served
as U.S. ambassador to Finland from April 2008 to January 2009.
Her
husband, Craig Barrett, is a former chairman and chief executive of chip-maker
Intel Corp.
Canadian
first in line
Barrett is training
alongside Laliberte at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside
Moscow, but only Laliberte is booked on the Soyuz TMA-16 flight slated to
launch Sept. 30 from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan.
Laliberte
is the seventh person in history to arrange a paid, multimillion-dollar trek to
the International Space Station, though his flight is the eighth private
orbital spaceflight since 2001. American billionaire Charles Simonyi flew to
the station twice, in 2007 and again earlier
this year, under deals between Russia's Federal Space Agency and Space
Adventures.
If Laliberte
is unable to fly for any reason Barrett would take his place, a situation that
arose only once before in 2006. During that instance, Japanese businessman Daisuke
Enomoto was replaced by his backup, American entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari, who
went on to fly an 11-day mission to the station.
Space
Adventures has arranged every private spaceflight to the International Space
Station since the 2001 launch of American businessman Dennis Tito. The flights
have recently been pegged at about $30 million per trip, though Laliberte has
not specified the cost of his trip.
If
Laliberte is cleared for the flight, he will fly with Russian cosmonaut Maksim
Surayev and NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams, both of whom are due to remain at
the station until March 2010.
The space
station is currently home
to six people - two Russian cosmonauts and one astronaut each from the
U.S., Japan, Canada and Belgium. The spaceflyers are the first full-sized crew
for the station and represent all of the major international space agencies
building the $100 billion orbital outpost.
SPACE.com
Senior Editor Tariq Malik contributed to this report.
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